Re: RIA technologies

[Leszek Gawron <lg...@mobilebox.pl>]

Grzegorz Kossakowski wrote:
> Reinhard Poetz pisze:
>> Technologies for RIA that run within browsers have been around for years
>> - do you remember, there was something called "Java applets" long time
>> ago ;-) - but I think that none of them will become the dominator for
>> public internet applications because nobody wants to rely on something
>> which needs to be installed by the user.
> 
> Applets had been promoted before Web2.0 term has been coined and, most importantly, applets were
> utterly slow and ugly looking. There were no tools for designers that could experiment with making
> good looking UI for their own as it's today in Ajax or Flash applications.

Ajax is not the Ferrari either. I started to dislike cForms when dojo 
was introduced as main ajax engine. The simplest page with cForm takes 
300ms more to render than before. Awful...

As for the tools: there are no ajax tools available either. A JS syntax 
enabled editor can be hardly called tool support :)

> Once again, risk of forcing user to do one-click installation of Flash is not an issue today.
> 
>> In contrast, Ajax frameworks run in every modern browser (IE>=6, FF,
>> Safari) and modern Ajax frameworks (prototype, mootools, dojo, jQuery,
>> etc.) are really impressive.
> 
> Yes, the progress is spectacular but I'm still feeling all these framework are fighting too much
> issues and contain too much hacks. Last time I had to work with Dojo was my Forms refactoring and I
> remember that debugging Dojo was very painful experience. I hope situation improved since then.

Client side javascript has exactly the same problem our flowscript has:
   - you cannot tell if it's gonna work if you do not run it
   - you have hard time creating test cases
   - any refactoring is a major PITA.
   - debug tools are: print( "here I am" ) and nothing more (apart from 
GWT which uses 'advanced magic').

> 
> What I'm also concerned about is that if anyone takes into consideration long-term future of Ajax
> and it's ability to innovate. We have been already surprised by what Ajax gurus can achieve but I
> fear that there is a wall somewhere and with sign "Internet Explorer" painted. Since Microsoft puts
> a lot of effort into their own RIA technology I hardly see a reason why they would want to put
> innovation into their browser.

Other reasons why RIA does not work for me:
   - try running it on any modern Smartphone and you'll fail miserably. 
Only iPhone has a decent web browser.
   - you introduce client/server again so you need to 
create/test/maintain your communication protocol. Another layer to handle.
   - If you are sending your business objects over the wire you have to 
serialize them (introduce value objects again) and loose lots of ORM 
support (old problem with serializing referenced entities and lazy 
loaded collections).

	lg

-- 
Leszek Gawron                         http://www.mobilebox.pl/krs.html
CTO at MobileBox Ltd.

Re: RIA technologies

[Peter Hunsberger <pe...@gmail.com>]

On 8/30/07, Leszek Gawron <lg...@mobilebox.pl> wrote:
>
> Client side javascript has exactly the same problem our flowscript has:
<snip/>
>    - debug tools are: print( "here I am" ) and nothing more (apart from
> GWT which uses 'advanced magic').
>

Not quite: Firebug for FireFox is wonderful for debugging AJAX code.
Let's you see the request the response, the current value of any form
field, etc.

FWIW, we have replaced all of our front end code that previously used
Flash with AJAX code, the developers are more productive and the
results are more esthetically pleasing.  I personally feel that there
are major advances to be made on front end scripting, but the current
crop of AJAX tools are a major leap forward from anything else we've
had available for complex cross browser UI functionality in the last
10 years.

-- 
Peter Hunsberger

Re: RIA technologies

[Grzegorz Kossakowski <gk...@apache.org>]

Leszek Gawron pisze:
> Ajax is not the Ferrari either. I started to dislike cForms when dojo
> was introduced as main ajax engine. The simplest page with cForm takes
> 300ms more to render than before. Awful...
> 
> As for the tools: there are no ajax tools available either. A JS syntax
> enabled editor can be hardly called tool support :)

:-)

> Client side javascript has exactly the same problem our flowscript has:
>   - you cannot tell if it's gonna work if you do not run it
>   - you have hard time creating test cases
>   - any refactoring is a major PITA.

I can imagine that!

> Other reasons why RIA does not work for me:
>   - try running it on any modern Smartphone and you'll fail miserably.
> Only iPhone has a decent web browser.

What about JavaFX again? Sun promises that it cares about mobile from the beginning.

>   - you introduce client/server again so you need to
> create/test/maintain your communication protocol. Another layer to handle.

What do you mean by introduce "client/server again"? Don't we have client-server communication all
the time?

>   - If you are sending your business objects over the wire you have to
> serialize them (introduce value objects again) and loose lots of ORM
> support (old problem with serializing referenced entities and lazy
> loaded collections).

When talking about RIAs I'm having ROA in mind not business objects. Nevertheless, usually there is
1-1 mapping between business objects and resources (in ROA sense) to some extent. What's important
with ROA is that you send links to other resources and don't even try to send every needed piece of
data in one request. It's called connectedness of resources and it's actually one of important
characteristic of good ROA.
I have written something about it in this[1] e-mail.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@cocoon.apache.org/msg53155.html

-- 
Grzegorz Kossakowski
http://reflectingonthevicissitudes.wordpress.com/